Actually -- it's not "keep" or "lose" exactly. We ADD the sound, because it's written that way! Some Yankee dialects, including my own, rectify pronunciation/orthography divergences by changing the pronunciation. Words like "folk" come from roots which have the "l" sound, but which lost it before coming into modern English. We put them BACK.
This is even more the case with vowel sounds. We distinguish between "Mary", "marry", and "merry", for instance, which probably were originally pronounced identically. We Yankees create subtle vowel differences based on the distinct spellings.
We speak written English, rather than writing spoken English.
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Date: 2013-08-27 07:09 pm (UTC)This is even more the case with vowel sounds. We distinguish between "Mary", "marry", and "merry", for instance, which probably were originally pronounced identically. We Yankees create subtle vowel differences based on the distinct spellings.
We speak written English, rather than writing spoken English.